This passage reminded me of the quote by Russian historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s.

When asked to speak about his research on the bloodshed and heartache of the Russian Revolution he said:

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Honestly, I think the long and short of it is that determinism and crisis will bring tyranny.

Russian Revolution. Chinese Revolution. Cambodian Revolution. Vietnam. French.

Take your pick.

Might simply becomes right – for what else could “right” be based on?

The burden of proof is on the other side, I believe.

By this stage, nearly five years into the conversation, it was possible to describe the participants’ general orientation to the problems of the day, though they differed considerably on some details. The first agreed-upon point was that the disastrous wars of the twentieth century were the natural consequence of a loss of European religious focus and unity that had occurred over a very long period through gradual erosion.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)